


with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Canon-Compliant, F/F, Mentions of Prostitution, Mentions of non-con, PTSD, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:39:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: This fic deals a lot with the fallout of rape and trauma. Please be aware.





	with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melissima](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melissima/gifts).



> This fic deals a lot with the fallout of rape and trauma. Please be aware.

This is the truth of it: Moira _hates_ the snow, which makes Canada distinctly a bad place for her, because it’s all snow, all the time. She used to think that Boston got a lot of snow, but Toronto is the place where it feels like snow is born and where snow goes to die a slow, protracted death. 

And this is also the truth of it: Moira didn’t used to hate snow, but after she ran, after she left and thought that the snow was going to show every track she took into cold. She thought that it would lead the Eyes right to her. She used to like the snow; the way it piled up and made Boston a tolerable place, pretty and pale, how it could stop life in its tracks and give them a day off. But not anymore.

But now her greatest wish is to find a nice, warm place to live out the rest of her life, preferably with a woman who won’t ask why Moira will only do oral, and that any vibrator introduced to their sex life will have to be smaller than two inches. No dildos, no strapons. Bullets only. Only don’t call them bullets.

Jesus, she’s so fucked.

It’s snowing now; the lights of December (secular Christmas is still incredible, the rush of malls and the press of commercial consumerism actually _reassuring_ ) are being taken down and all that’s left are the harsh streetlights, the dark, and the snow, falling, falling, falling. She’s walking alone, because she loves to walk alone now that she knows what it’s like to not be able to, with groceries that she bought herself, and she’s thinking that she wants to fucking move to Cuba.

There’s a guy behind her.

She always knows when there’s a guy behind her, because _she always knows_. She remembers the days, back back back, before everything, when she always knew there was a guy behind her if the opportunity presented itself. Then that sense, that woman-sense that all women seem to possess, the self-preservation sense of _danger, male presence_ became _danger, Eyes_ and _danger, rape_ became _danger, bullet_. _Danger, state-mandated trap and breed program_. So. Actually, it's the same, only now there's religion tied up in it.

She can feel her heart racing, thumping in her ribcage, and she forces herself to walk slower, and then a few moments later the guy is too close and she has to force herself not to scream, and then a moment later the guy passes her completely, apologizing for crossing her path in the snow, and Moira stops completely and laughs, and hates everything that she’s become.

~~~~~

She thinks of it in two ways. There’s _Before_ , when she had girlfriends and she had friends and she agency, and _After_ , when she has Luke and she has therapy and she has _fucking agency_. 

During, she had none of those things. At Jezebels, she had agency in as much as she could fuck or she could die. At Jezebels, she had Aurora, whose name might not have been Aurora, because there’s no way that a girl who was known for letting a dude fuck her while she pretended to be asleep was really named _Aurora_. Aurora was not a dyke, but Aurora was also touch deprived, and so she and Moira would come together like lightning bugs sometimes, fast and furious, just for the pleasure of the touch of skin on skin.

So _During_ is the third option, and she only thinks of it when something happens. Gilead is remarkable in so many ways, but the one that boggles the most is the silence that pours out of the entire nation like a fog. It’s like a black hole consumed a portion of North America, and occasionally a small propaganda fairy dressed like an asshole comes out, waving statistics about birth rates.

~~~~

Eliza Adams - unaware of the particular Americanness of her name, it seems - is a pretty woman. She has thick dark hair and smooth skin and light brown eyes. She is half First Nations, she says, and she works, she says, for the CBC. She is the first person who works for the CBC that Moira has ever met, although in Moira’s survivor group, they tell her that ex-Handmaids always get a CBC reporter. They say it's always a woman, after one time it was a dude and the girl freaked out. Moira thinks if it was her, she would probably accuse him of being an Eye. Right there, in public.

They’re desperate for a story, and so far, they haven’t gotten much. To get an ex-Handmaid to talk isn’t only about excavating a trauma and engaging with a horrific past, its asking for a risk beyond reward. CBC thinks they’re asking about _During_ , but what they’re threatening is _Before_ , and _After_. They ask about why they didn’t see it coming, and suddenly those pristine memories of a world that they loved is tainted by the horrible fact that they all knew what was happening. They all saw the misogyny, the Christian right’s response to threats. They all laughed at _The War on Christmas_ and rolled their eyes at Serena Joy’s book. They made stupid jokes about Starbucks cups and said _Happy Holidays_ and discussed how to offend Christians by making cakes shaped like dicks and vaginas.

They all saw it and they didn’t do anything, because it all seemed so _silly_ , so _stupid_ , and not dangerous at all.

They want to know _During_ and don’t understand _After._ Moira gets it. So many Handmaids were Handmaids, after all, because somewhere out there is a child or a lover that might have gotten away. Or might not. And the blinders they put on the Handmaids isn’t just the red veil. They are a group of women who were held prisoner, and are now held hostage by the same thing - the potential for violence against the things that they cannot bring themselves to not love anymore.

But Moira gets it, too. The rumors here are strange, and the truth is possibly more fascinating. There are stories of harems, and religious cults, and churches with brothels attached, and no one is willing to correct the salaciousness of them.

Besides, Moira wants to point out, the truth is both infinitely more boring and a hundred times more horrific.

Eliza, though. “I’d really love to sit down and speak to you. We can make you anonymous, we can protect you,” she says, as she hands Moira her card. It’s a coffee shop that they met in, and Moira has a coffee that’s _hers_ , that she paid for.

Moira is kind, because Eliza is pretty, and because she’s ignorant, and because she’s so unbelievably unaware of how lucky she is to be that way. “Thank you,” she says, when the card is handed to her. “Let me think about it,” she adds, and smiles a little, but doesn’t look her in the eye.

Eliza, bless her, knows a no when she hears one, and with the manners so stereotypical of a Canadian, smiles back and thanks Moira.

Afterwards, Moira goes into a park and screams and screams until the cops come. She screams and screams and they’re Canadian cops so a black woman screaming in the park is just a cause for concern and not a reason to shoot her in the leg (can’t injure that womb). They talk her down. Luke is there, and he explains. She’s not arrested, but she’s furious, because again, a man had to intercede on behalf of her fury.

She thinks her rage could swallow the world.

~~~~

On good days she thinks of June.

~~~~

On bad days she thinks of Offred.

~~~~

On the worst days, she thinks of both of them, until they swirl in her head because she’s unwilling to let them be the same person.

~~~~

She’s walking home and she sees a woman with a little girl, and she swallows down all the horror of it, all the pain of the day that she saw June there in the Red Center, and how her first thought was _but what about-_

God, they’re indoctrinating her even now, to be a good Christian girl, who shuts her cunt up until a man can come and stuff it with a fucking baby. She wonders how long those sick assholes will wait. She’s just seven, or eight now. Moira thinks, but doesn’t know. She doesn’t talk about her with Luke. He always looks like he’s on the edge of sobbing when he sees small clothes, tiny shoes, little kids and their toys. It’s kindness to not bring it up.

~~~~

The first time she has sex in Canada, she has a panic attack that accompanies it. The girl is so fucking understanding about it. All that Moira wants is an orgasm, and instead she gets her heart racing and her stomach heaving and this sick feeling in her gut that screams that this is dangerous, that she’s being stupid, that she needs to _not do this_ the second that the girl’s head is against her inner thigh.

The girl - whose name she does not know - is patient. She moves away. She goes and gets a glass of water, and a Xanax, which she shows to Moira is in the package, which is sealed up. She sits there and doesn’t touch her until the Xanax kicks in and Moira gets dressed and apologizes.

The girl drives her home, to Luke, who sits in silence as Moira pushes her face into her hands, and helpfully does not offer any physical comfort at all. Moira thinks if he touched her, she’d probably claw his eyes out. 

~~~~

She misses Before. Before, she was a person, and not a gun where the safety is broken.

~~~~

Ofbart, was her name. Once. Her name Before, and After, is Alexis, and she’s the first ex-Handmaid to talk. Moira has been in Canada for almost three months when the article - long, and extensive, and obscene - is published online. 

Ofbart doesn’t lie, and immediately Gilead responds with a denial, which surprises no one. When Aunts leave, they talk. But Aunts are different, Handmaids are the dangerous ones, because Handmaids always know more than anyone thinks they do. Alexis is no exception. She talks about state-sponsored rape and state-sponsored pregnancy and state-sponsored silence. Before Alexis, they thought it might be artificial insemination. Handmaids getting pregnant in sterile rooms. Doctors making women have babies, but nothing actually this disgusting. She talks about the Red Center and Rachel and Leah and that fucking passage that they would read, over and over again. Moira thinks she can recite it from memory.

After Alexis, there’s no hiding it.

She commits suicide two days after it’s published. They find her in her apartment, and there’s a box with the hand of a child. Everyone is shocked by this, but Moira isn’t. Before the full autopsy confirms it, she tells Luke with the knowledge of someone who has seen worse, that the child’s hand belongs to a little girl.

They would never damage a boy that way. A boy needs all his body parts. A girl only needs a womb.

~~~~~

But here’s the thing.

Moira thinks that the only person in her life is herself. 

No, that’s not right.

She’s running, free, and for the first time in years she feels like _Before_. She goes into a coffee shop and gets a drink and thinks that men have been doing all the talking for her since _During_ , and now she’s in _After_. She thinks of surviving and how that’s what she’s been doing. Raging, yes, but always surviving, always careful, afraid of men and afraid of sex and afraid of hands being shipped to her.

But whose hands?

No, really, whose?

She wasn’t careful, but any means. But her parents are gone, and she never had a kid, and she doesn’t have anyone to hurt. June, maybe.

But they’d have to know to use June against her.

She doesn’t ask Luke. Luke would say no; Luke would panic. But he didn’t see June. He didn't see her fury, too. She thinks that June would expect this, and she can't disappoint her again.

~~~~

 _During_ , when June came, when she spoke to her, Moira thought about _Before_ , when she had disappointed her mother with her first girlfriend, back when she was in high school. 

Except disappointing June was worse, because June didn’t care about the thing that Moira became to survive, as much as she mourned the person Moira was, before survival.

~~~~

And really, it’s snowing again, and she thinks, when is life going to wake up from this bullshit?

~~~~

The day she tells her story it’s the first day she sees a bunch of crocuses, blue and purple, clustered together in a lump. Moira likes that; she hates the color red.

~~~~

They call it the Whore of Babylon’s Tale. They don’t want to, but Moira insists on it, because she finally feels like herself. It pours out of her like water, but at first the fountain is tampered with, clogged up. It takes some real work to regurgitate this shit, to clear all the crap from where it settled inside of her. But finally, there it is, out in the open.

Eliza is crying before even the first half, but she’s a fucking soldier about it, so she cries but keeps her shit together, too, making sure that all the crying is done with her head down as she writes the notes that she can, the recorder catching the rest. Moira tells her about everything. She clarifies shit about the Red Center, she talks about Jezebels, she names names and gives fucking descriptions - lurid ones - of the shape of the commander’s dicks, of birthmarks and moles, of the sick and disgusting things they would do.

She gives Canada - and the rest of the world - a real account. Not the clean, scrubbed up one coming from the propaganda tool, or the blindered one from an ex-Handmaid. No. There’s nothing that comes out of Moira’s mouth that isn’t true, but nothing that’s flattering.

It comes out as spring really starts, as the weather finally turns warm, and Luke doesn’t speak to her for days.

~~~~

Moira wishes that her story had blown the world apart. That it would have convinced the other nations to band together and free the women of Gilead. She wishes that it had done more than cause a scandal for a few days, weeks. She wishes that it was enough to end what she suffered through.

But the world doesn’t work that way.

~~~~

There are no fingers. There are no hands. There isn’t a lawsuit. There is a demand to _return her for trial_ , but the Canadian government has no intention of doing so. In the end, Moira has nothing, but Gilead, they have even less.

It makes her think. There is _Before_ , and _During_ , and _After_. And now there's one more. There's _Now_.

That's where she is. _Now._

~~~~

A man is following her. He walks by, and she turns her head just as he looks at her and gives that apologetic smile.

She smiles back. He passes.


End file.
